But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking.
~ Mitch Albom

If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~ Leonard Cohen

Thought for the Day:

"What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers." Logan Pearsall Smith

A big thanks,
Steady rainfall here today in Portland. I wanted to thank again Monica Drake, Christina Katz , Adam O'Connor Rodriguez  and Emily Whitman for teaching at my first annual Making It in Tough & Changing Times  Writing Conference. Thanks also to Athena and Amy Baskin for their help and Amy Pulitzer for the fabulous cookies. Thank god I only ate a nibble. These post-conference days when I'm both exhausted and exhilarated are some of my favorites of the year.

Stay tuned for information on Summer in Words, 2012. Fifth annual to be held at the Hallmark Inn & Resort, June 15-17. I'm finalizing the line up of speakers.

Thought for the day:

I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil. ~Billy Collins

Thought for the day: 

Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing to do is shovel shit from a sitting position. ~STEPHEN KING

Quick Take: Listening in
The trope of overhearing a conversation or a plot hatching as when Huck Finn overhears Injun Joe's plot to murder Widow Douglas or when Tom and Huck listen in on their funeral exists in fiction. But here's the thing: Twain was spinning tall tales and he was writing for a less-sophisticated readers back in the 1800s. Contemporary readers want realistic devices in their fictional plots. So avoid scenes where your characters listen in or overhear other conversations, especially those told at a distance. This sort of thing is usually done for the author's convenience.  And the more realistic the storyline, the more realistic the means by which you deliver it.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Recommended for anyone longing to get more words on the page, better words on the page, and break into the new publishing landscape.

Last Chance

To register for Making It in Tough & Changing Times 1-day conference on January 28th

You know where to find me.

When Do You Need To Secure Permission

After I sent out my January newsletter one of my readers wrote and asked permission to use my article as an "outline" and then give it to her art students. She sent me the document she was planning to use as this "outline." Basically, she had cut and pasted my column titled True North in its entirety and then had changed a few details and words so that it was her story and not mine. I wrote back and politely told her that my column was copyrighted and her use of the whole document didn't fall under fair use. That she was welcome to quote a few lines, but that she needed to write her own blasted column. Well, to be honest, I didn't say blasted and the word I was thinking of didn't begin with B. Mostly I was baffled that she'd imagine that this sort of thing is permissible.

Copyright and fair use is difficult to explain and I don't understand all the intricacies of it. I always try to attribute everything I use here and use what's in the public domain. Again, difficult to define. Which is why this piece by Jane Friedman is so welcome. Here is the link.

Questions to ask yourself before you plot

I've been working on a memo for a client and created these questions that I thought I'd pass along. You can find them here.

Fog is thick and haunting this morning here in the Northwest.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Quick Take:

Just like dandelions, adverbs grow thick roots when left undisturbed. Serious weeding is needed if you plan to get those suckers out of your manuscript.
And that’s only if you can find them.
See, for many novice writers, adverbs are like miniature Klingon warships, zipping around your manuscript with their cloaking devices activated. They hide in plain sight until an agent or editor requests a partial, and then BAM—they drop their cloak and wave their little “-ly” appendages like pirates toting skull and crossbones flags. We hates them, precious.  ~ Heather Howland

Mark Twain’s Rules of Story Writing

1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
2. The episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.
3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
6. When the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale.
9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. The characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

1. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
2. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
3. Eschew surplusage.
4. Not omit necessary details.
5. Avoid slovenliness of form.
6. Use good grammar.
7. Employ a simple and straightforward style

Thought for the day: Noticing
"You know what I believe? I remember in college I was taking this math class, this really great math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped midsentence and said, 'Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.' That's what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it - or my observation of it - is temporary?" ~ John Green

Just for fun:Handy Field Guide to Thriller Characters via Chelsea Cain
Trust me, this list is too good to be true from the ever-talented thriller author Chelsea Cain. If you haven't read her series set in Portland, you're missing a thrill ride.

Question for Writers: The legendary Etta James died today and I'm working with her songs playing in the background, giving me chills and stirring the deepest parts of me. What if we wrote the way she sang? That is, bringing in every part of us. What if we transformed all the pain, rage, angst, worry, faith, fragility, fierceness, and hope onto the page?

It's been raining, deluging, flooding around here and I'm home at my computer watching it all, working on a memo to a client. Phone just rang with cancelled dinner plans for tomorrow night--they cannot get out of their driveway since it's underwater. Like six feet of water.

    Quick Take:

      Everything a character does should not only forward the plot, but should also be designed to allow the reader to discover more about that character- -and in particular, to learn the vital elements (secrets, emotional needs, desires, inner conflict, attitudes)  that are relevant to the story.

Making It in Tough & Changing Times One-Day Writing Conference

What do Editors Want?

With the publishing world changing at a dizzying pace sometimes writers wish they owned a crystal ball or had more access to editors' thinking about the current marketplace. Here's a link to an article where British editors weigh in on the topic.

To find out what Adam O' Connor Rodriguez editor at Hawthorne Books is looking for in a query to their publishing house, join us on Saturday, January 28th for Making It in Tough & Changing Times. Contact me for information.

Update from Planet Published

Here is the livecast of LP O'Bryan's book launch in Dublin.  http://twitcasting.tv/lpobryan/movie/3478923. What a great crowd! In it he mentions how he began writing every day 12 years ago.

Planet Published

In the past year the number of writers I know who are now or are soon-to-be on Planet Published has risen dramatically. LP O'Bryan wrote to me from Ireland about a year or so ago after he read my book Bullies, Bastards, & Bitches, How to Write the Bad Guys in Fiction. I've been following his progress since then.

I remember the first day I started writing that book. I had gotten the contract from Writer's Digest in March, but I was finishing another book at the time, so I pushed the project off until May.  The morning came around that I need to start working on it and I walked into my office with such fear and worry. How the hell was I going to get across my ideas? No one had written a book about characters like the one I was proposing. I wanted readers to take risks with their protagonists, I wanted to really nail the role anti-heroes in contemporary storytelling, and talk about creating fully-drawn villains. I wanted to remind writers that all characters are vulnerable.

I was scared when I wrote the book and I stayed scared throughout writing it. The book got written,with lots of hiccups and back and forths with my great editor Kelly Nickell. She didn't like the early drafts, my logic, my organization. So there was a lot of rewriting and heart ache. But it was published and I hear from a lot of writers about how they learned from it. Back to LP O'Bryan. He writes:   

"On the 10th December 2010 I attended a crime writing workshop at Harper Collins' offices in Hammersmith, west London. While I was there I met an editor. She asked to see the novel I was working on.

One year, one month and nine days later that novel is out in mass market paperback format all over the UK and Ireland. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Turkey and Greece are all expected to release the novel this year. The name of then novel is The Istanbul PuzzleIt is the first in a series of novels featuring Sean Ryan and Isabel Sharp, being published by Harper Collins. The Istanbul Puzzle starts when Sean discovers a friend and colleague has been beheaded in Istanbul." O'Bryan risked so much to get this book published, since he's a husband and father. You can read Chapter 1 here. Also, check out his whole blog, author's site, noticing how effective it is at telling his story and selling his books.

You know the drill: Keep writing, keep dreaming, and support other writer's dreams and accomplishments.  Meanwhile,  I'll keep bringing more stories and interviews from Planet Published.